Flavorous you

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Most of the time we watch "content" because everyone is watching. From fear of FOMO, to understand people's clever tweets and compete with our own. Consumption is the bonding on offer, so we become bonded consumer-labour, shoveling bite upon tasteless bite, stuffing our souls with heavily marketed, lovelessly produced stuff at 1.5x.

Then sometimes we stumble upon something that connects us to our deepest yearnings. So it was that I stumbled upon the Japanese show La Grande Maison Tokyo (LGMT) on Netflix. LGMT is that elusive thing: a mainstream show not excusing lazy choices with "commercial" wala excuses. It embraces the satisfying conventions of a story about underdogs with powerful opponents, is full of characters with quirks, gruff love, metaphors for life and moments where you choke up. It is also delicate, novelistic, complex and insightful.

Two middle-aged chefs meet in filmi fashion. Obana, once the chef of a restaurant with two Michelin stars, has a mishap that upends his life and that of his team. Rinko has cooked for years, in a restaurant full of happy customers, but longs for the excellence and validation of Michelin stars. His reputation is mud, she has none. They decide to start a restaurant which will reframe French cuisine with Japanese ingredients and aim for three Michelin stars.

Obana re-assembles members of his old team. It's not easy. They hate his guts. But they yearn to be part of something audacious, inventive and above all, beautiful, with their full abilities. So they collect to cook in a room full of old wounds and new doubts.

LGMT is not a show about food, but about the act of cooking - what it demands of us, what we bring to it as cultures and people. Every kind of cooking has its place. The rice pudding a mother makes for her sick child, which tastes of only sugar and love. The hearty reliability of a neighbourhood diner which makes only one dish, but customises it to each regular's individual needs. The acquired taste of a subtle tuna cooked with only a hot knife, a gamey consommé made with venison blood. They are not the same, but they are equally valuable.

Cooking is an art, one character says, because it offers the eater, khud se mulaqat, a chance to encounter the unknown self, its coiled desires and memories. What does it take to make such art? Skill of course, and curiosity. But most of all, the willingness to challenge and be challenged, to change and be changed. Genius flowers not alone but in tandem with others. One must journey deep inside, but never forget the other - the eater, the audience, the companion.

Obana must journey from Western individualistic notions of genius and authority to collegiality. Rinko must expand from self-effacing care to self-confidence and self-belief. The acceptance of a mistake, resentment, hurt are not linear "healing journeys" from trauma as is de rigeur nowadays. Rather these are journeys of growth, in which wounding and healing are ongoing cycles as we become not our best, but our most flavorous (as Yazdani bakery would say) selves. Making food, art or amends takes time. Perhaps that might be love, which witnesses, accompanies and waits together.

In a world that emphasises strategy, LGMT suggests that all risks cannot be calculated. Some must be based on deep intuition, or creativity, which unleashes a new imagination of self in community. Watch and feel nourished.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com